The mechanical mixture would be complete; as it would probably be put, the white race would have absorbed the black.  There would be no inferior race to domineer over; there would be no superior race to oppress those who differed from them in racial externals.  The inevitable social struggle, which in one form or another, seems to be one of the conditions of progress, would proceed along other lines than those of race.  If now and then, for a few generations, an occasional trace of the black ancestor should crop out, no one would care, for all would be tarred with the same stick.  This is already the case in South America, parts of Mexico and to a large extent in the West Indies.  From a Negroid nation, which ours is already, we would have become a composite and homogeneous people, and the elements of racial discord which have troubled our civil life so gravely and still threaten our free institutions, would have been entirely eliminated.

But this will never happen.  The same result will be brought about slowly and obscurely, and, if the processes of nature are not too violently interrupted by the hand of man, in such a manner as to produce the best results with the least disturbance of natural laws.  In another article I shall endeavor to show that this process has been taking place with greater rapidity than is generally supposed, and that the results have been such as to encourage the belief that the formation of a uniform type out of our present racial elements will take place within a measurably near period.

Boston Evening Transcript, August 18, 1900

A STREAM OF DARK BLOOD IN THE VEINS OF THE SOUTHERN WHITES

I have said that the formation of the new American race type will take place slowly and obscurely for some time to come, after the manner of all healthy changes in nature.  I may go further and say that this process has already been going on ever since the various races in the Western world have been brought into juxtaposition.  Slavery was a rich soil for the production of a mixed race, and one need only read the literature and laws of the past two generations to see how steadily, albeit slowly and insidiously, the stream of dark blood has insinuated itself into the veins of the dominant, or, as a Southern critic recently described it in a paragraph that came under my eye, the “domineering” race.  The Creole stories of Mr. Cable and other writers were not mere figments of the imagination; the beautiful octoroon was a corporeal fact; it is more than likely that she had brothers of the same complexion, though curiously enough the male octoroon has cut no figure in fiction, except in the case of the melancholy Honore Grandissime, f.m.c; and that she and her brothers often crossed the invisible but rigid color line was an historical fact that only an ostrich-like prejudice could deny.